Fond recollections, earnest tributes - the 10-year anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death has been marked, above all, by good taste. Views of the chaotic life of the man and the band he fronted have evidently been mellowed by the passing decade, to the point where we find it represented this week by two dominant viewpoints.

That Cobain's music continues to wield enduring power, enjoyed still by the legions of "Kurt's kids". And that Cobain's death was - for fans now in their late 20s and 30s at least - an event analogous in significance to the Kennedy assassination.

A nice soundbite, certainly, but Kurt Cobain's death also comes, like JFK's, with a conspiracy theory attached. The casual fan may be unaware of it, but a murder theory has been fermenting for years on the net, among other places, and this week it gets another outing with the publication of Max Wallace and Ian Halperin's Love And Death, An Investigation Into The Murder Of Kurt Cobain (Allison & Busby, £14.99).

Obviously very keen not to sound like lunatics, the authors of this book are at pains to retain a certain calmness in the face of their apparently outlandish subject. They re-examine discrepancies, unlikely coincidences and general hints of fishiness about the death narrative which even people highly suspicious of their motivations - it's a 15-quid hardback - are likely to be more than slightly interested in reading.

It'd be nice at this point to say "see what you think" and go into a few details about what the authors allege. That's sadly not possible at this time, but the broader strokes of what the book reveals about the life and last days of Kurt Cobain, and life as part of his circle, paint a fairly unattractive picture.

Battling drugs, re-negotiating contracts with his band, maintaining a relationship with his infant daughter - even discounting "the theory" altogether, this is clearly the story of a man with tragic events beginning to enfold him.

Thorough investigations notwithstanding, there are only a handful of people who know what it was like inside Grunge Camelot, and none of them are likely to talk any time soon. The overriding impression one is left with is that, whatever went on there, it's ambitious to think any outsider really knows the half of it.

There's plenty more in the book, of course, even the name of the man who has admitted to killing Cobain (like everyone, he's got a website). But opportunistic, plain wrong or not, this book is valuably different in tone to everything else you'll read on the subject this week. Right though it is to celebrate this man's talent and his life, it's undoubtedly just as valuable to learn a lesson from the tragic confusion around his death.

Cobain was surrounded by greed and gun-literate junkies. He'd started to become the cliche that he had helped to overturn, seemingly with nowhere left to run. Everyone can remember where they were when his body was found. Occasionally it can't hurt to remember where he was, too.